A housekeeping day rather than a feature day, with one bug worth writing down.
The placeholder music is out
Four placeholder tracks were deleted so the real ones can take their place — they were only ever there to prove the wiring. All 125 sound effects are untouched and still carry the mix.
The music bus stays off until the real tracks land. Which is where it got interesting.
A guard that is always red guards nothing
There is a build check whose entire job is to fail when music is missing. Its own header records why it exists: a build once shipped completely silent, because every WAV was correct on disk and nothing pointed at them. No individual piece misbehaved enough to log anything.
Silence is the one audio bug that looks like a decision.
Today silence is the decision, so deleting the placeholder tracks would have made the check fail on every run until the real music arrives. That is worse than it sounds. A guard that is always red gets muted, and then it is not there on the day it matters.
So it was gated rather than removed:
- Bus off — the music checks skip, the run passes, and a log line says why.
- Bus on — every original check runs, unweakened: clips present, clips wired, streaming set correctly on the two looping beds, and no peak normalisation anywhere in the set.
One case stays a hard failure either way: a missing audio-tuning asset. That is the wiring break the file was written for in the first place, and unlike an empty music folder, it cannot tell anyone it was deliberate.
Twice inside a wall, and the sweeps could not see it
A five-minute playtest put Mittens inside solid geometry twice.
Once inside a floor tile, with no cardinal escape within 4.13 units — the motor held her in place rather than let her fall through the level, which is the right failure but still a failure. Once inside a crate, from which she was depenetrated 1.66 units sideways.
The part worth knowing is why nothing caught it earlier. Physics queries in this project are configured not to start inside colliders, which means every box cast fired from inside a collider comes back empty. An empty result is indistinguishable from a clear path. So for exactly as long as she is stuck, the instrument that would report she is stuck reports open air.
Both are diagnosed rather than fixed. Whatever puts her there — a teleport, a warp box exit, a moving platform, a spring — has to leave at least one pixel of clearance, and that is the fix worth making rather than widening the escape search.